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Fix: Start Menu and Cortana not Opening in Windows 10

Update: It seems that the final version of Windows 10 is also affected by the issue. The start menu fails to open after upgrading from a previous version of Windows.

Windows 10 is currently available as Technical Preview which means that there are still a lot of issues and bugs which need fixing before the Operating System gets ready for use by consumers. Some users using the Windows 10 Technical Preview (build 9926) are facing an odd issue where the Start Menu (and Cortana/Search) would not work/open anymore, no matter if they click on the Start Button, Press the Windows key on the keyboard or press Ctrl + Esc. System Restore seems to be the cause of this error, but there can be more. Anyways, here’s how to sort it out.

Making the Windows 10 Start Menu Work Again

There can be
multiple reasons for the broken Start Menu and as usual, one solution
cannot fit everywhere. Still, you should definitely give the following a
try and who knows, the Start Menu starts working again, saving you from
a full reset or reinstalling Windows 10 again.

Do
backup any data you’ve saved in the Modern Apps as all of them will be
re-installed. Desktop software and apps won’t be affected though.

Open Windows PowerShell as Administrator Method 1:

Press Windows Key + R on your keyboard

Key in PowerShell and hit Enter.

Right click on the PowerShell icon on the taskbar and select Run as Administrator.

Method 2:

Right click Start button

Choose Command prompt (Admin)

Key in Powershell in the black window and hit Enter.

Paste the following command in the Administrator: Windows PowerShell window and press Enter key:

Wait for PowerShell to execute and complete the command. Ignore the few errors (in red color) that may pop up.

When it finishes, try hitting Start and hopefully it’ll start working. If not, this solution won’t apply to you, unfortunately.

Still no luck? You can get everything to work fine by creating a new user account
and working under it. You will lose some of your user data, but most of
the files and documents can be transferred over by copying the data
from Desktop, Documents, Picture and other libraries.

Are you able to solve it for you by following the procedure mentioned
above or it fails? If it it fails, do make sure that you ran Powershell
as Administrator (window will be called Administrator: Windows PowerShell ) and gave the command enough time to execute.